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Sci Tech    H3'ed 1/23/13

Industrial Psychology: The Evolution Of A Global Control System

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Message Dan Mage
(originally published 6-5-2008, associated content/"yahoo voices")

The systems of large-group behavioral manipulation and control utilized by authoritarian structures are fundamentally anti-human in intent, practice and effect.  

"Industrial Psychology" was developed alongside a modern "correctional" theory during the Industrial Revolution. Industrial psychologist Frederick Winslow Taylor developed a system of applied behavioral psychology for the express purpose (in his own words) of making each worker "a mere automaton, a wooden man."
Since Taylor's time, these systematic assaults on the humanity and individuality of the worker have increased in intensity and sophistication, resulting in a relatively helpless and easily controlled human "herd," which in spite of its superior numbers remains subservient to the global elite. Business needs efficient and effective systems of behavioral control.

Brute force and physical forms of coercion are expensive and generally ineffective:

With the industrial revolution came labor unions and labor unrest. Faced with appalling working conditions, long hours, and sub-subsistence wages, workers felt they had little to lose and often were willing to endure much in the way of deprivation and brutality. Primitive and sometimes deadly attacks on the strikers would usually just increase the workers' resolve to struggle.

"By the turn of the century, the dramatic increase in factory mechanization, deplorable working conditions, and pressures to boost productivity (and thereby profit) resulted in a labor force in militant conflict with business. Initial attempts to control this situation through force (using Pinkerton police, imported strikebreakers, State militia, etc.) were generally unsuccessful and employers felt the need for more effective ways to control workers and their productivity; strategies that would come to form the specialty of 'industrial psychology' (to be distinguished from the later 'Psychology Industry') (Dr. Tana Dineen, "Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People"1995:113)

Michel Foucault defined the management's goal -controllable workers- with the term 'docile bodies.' Even in positions requiring formal education or advanced training, the docility of the worker is considered essential. ("Discipline and Punish," pp. 135-170)

Industrial Psychology makes workers interchangeable and therefore expendable, as a problematic worker may easily be replaced with a more docile one: 

"Taylorism" broke various tasks down into their smallest individual components, simple motions that could be learned in a very short period of time. 
Under Taylorism, management divided skilled work into its elementary component parts and redistributed it among a number of less skilled workers, each of whom performed only limited tasks in ways rigidly defined by management (or indirectly defined by the controls built into the machines they operate). This is perhaps most evident in the assembly line technology developed by Henry Ford. (Dineen, 1995:114)

It's possible to see this principle at work in wide variety of low-paying jobs and work places. Fast food, janitiorial and retail businesses usually require that a new hire learn as many of the lower level functions of the business as possible. At the same time, few of these individual tasks take more than a day or two to master, so that an employee may be replaced from within the company or from the outside job market.

The Global Elite is pro-actively involved in Industrial Psychology and also "The Psychology Industry" :

Mainstream psychotherapeutic doctrines, especially those that are behavioral, or cognitive-behavioral in focus generally define dissatifaction with living conditions and social norms as pathological conditions to be treated. The individual in treatment is encouraged to adjust to exisiting conditions, and desire for fairness or even self-gratification is said to be rooted in "irrational beliefs," or a biochemical imbalance. Medications and new definitions of what it is "rational" to think and feel at any given time are provided. Obedience and conformity are the desired results.

It makes perfect sense for businesses, quasi-governmental groups, governments of nations and the global elite to financially support these practices:

The World Bank now has a "Mental Health Division" to support corporate psychiatry globally!"(Martha Russell and Jean Stewart, Disablement, Prison, and Historical Segregation [Monthly Review 3, Volume 53, July/August 2001])

"Mind Manipulation" and "Psychological Fascism"

David Icke, a controversial conspiracy researcher, refers to the elite's utilization of industrial psychology and other systems of large -group behavioral control as "Mind Manipulation," and "Psychological Fascism,"(3) also acknowledging the superior efficiency of psychological control systems, particularly those that create an illusion of choice.

"...You cannot control billions of people with tanks in the streets and soldiers at the door. You can only do it by divide and rule-and by programming the mass consciousness (public opinion) into believing what you want them to do is a good idea or the only option."( Icke, 1995:383)

Icke uses the following example as a metaphor for the de facto One Party States, or "phoney democracies," that have resulted from global corporatism:

"I saw a television programme[sic] a few years ago that about research into animal behaviour[sic] and it featured a rather unpleasant experiment in which a mouse was placed in a network of glass tubes. Every few seconds it came to a junction and had a choice of going left or right. the mouse thought it was free to go wherever it wished, but in fact the choices were strictly controlled. Its freedom was an illusion...The human race today has allowed itself to be like that mouse in the tubes." (1995:332)

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I was born in NYC in 1959. I grew up in the DC area, the product of suburbia and liberal parents with doctoral-level educations. I dropped out of the public school system in eighth grade, and from all schooling by the age of 16. My life rapidly (more...)
 

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